The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  “Blimin, I don’t like talk like this,” Cross said.

  “It’s easier and simpler when we know what a man wants,” Blimin went relentlessly on. “But with you, we don’t know what you want. Well, good-bye.” Blimin turned and walked off briskly.

  Menti, still accompanied by the sullen Hank, was restrained, cordial, and noncommittal as he drove them back to Harlem. The nervous tension of the ceremony had given Eva a headache for which she took some aspirins and went to bed. Cross loitered in the living room, mulling over his dinner engagement with Houston. What had the Party said to him? And how much weight would Houston give to what the Party had said? He knew that the best proof of Houston’s suspiciousness would be for Houston to begin straightaway prying into his past. And it was too late now for him to fabricate a new past for himself. Every lie he told now would only increase his difficulties. Ought he to slip out of the apartment and vanish? Such an act would declare his guilt, and it would mean losing Eva forever.

  He left the apartment early to keep his dinner appointment with Houston; he wanted a chance to breathe some fresh air and organize his thoughts prior to confronting a man whose mind he feared. Houston knew what power was and loved it, or else he would not have stood to be elected to a public office. Would he, if he had Cross dead-to-rights, ravage him as he had seen Gil ravage Bob and Eva? Such was possible…Cross knew in his heart that the first man, from the police or from the Party, who could sense intuitively what his psychological state was would know that he was guilty. But in order to know that they would have to have courage enough to admit the character of the world in which he and they both lived; and he seriously doubted if Houston really had that much courage.

  Reluctantly he made his way toward Frank’s Restaurant on 125th Street through the cold wintry air. About him neon lights shimmered in red and blue and green and rose. For the first time in months Cross could see the sky stretching above the tenement roofs. A few clusters of brittle stars winked in a blue-black luminosity. Cars whirred over the icy asphalt pavement with sticky whines. He tramped grimly past towering Negro churches from whose doorways rolled softly, almost apologetically, the plaintive spirituals of his people. How lucky they were, those black worshippers, to be able to feel lonely together! What fantastic blessings were theirs to be able to express their sense of abandonment in a manner that bound them in unison! But with whom could he join in howling his loneliness?

  When he came in view of Frank’s Restaurant, he paused, dropped his cigarette and stomped out its glow with his heel. Then his body jerked; out of a corner of his eyes he saw two white men approaching. He lifted his head and looked at them. There was a light of intentionality in their eyes that gripped him and his lips parted slowly.

  “Are you Lionel Lane?” one of the men asked.

  “That’s right,” he answered.

  One of the men pulled his right hand from his coat pocket and pushed his outstretched palm under Cross’s nose; in that palm gleamed a police badge.

  “I’m Detective Hornsby, attached to the District Attorney’s office,” he said.

  “Yes?” he said and waited.

  “You had an appointment, I believe, with the District Attorney here at eight o’clock?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The District Attorney cannot make it. We tried to see you at your apartment, but you had gone,” Hornsby said.

  “I’m sorry,” Cross mumbled and waited; there was something else he knew that these men had to tell him.

  “The District Attorney asked us to bring you to him,” Hornsby said.

  Cross noticed that the other detective had his hands jammed into his overcoat pockets and he had not spoken a word or moved.

  “Am I being arrested?” Cross asked softly.

  “We cannot answer any questions, I’m afraid. Will you come along with us?” Hornsby asked.

  So this was it at last. The dinner engagement was resolving itself into an official confrontation. What did they know? Ought he make a dash for it? No; he could not get away; they might have other armed, plainclothes men nearby. He did not move and they had not moved. He was suddenly tired. The face of Eva flashed through his mind; he would lose her. And if he lost her, what else mattered? He sighed, nodded his head.

  “All right,” he said quietly.

  “Are you armed?” Hornsby asked.

  He hesitated, then smiled. “Yes.”

  “Where’s the gun? Don’t move. Just tell us and we’ll take it from you.”

  “It’s on my right hip,” he said.

  They were efficient; they relieved him of his gun without attracting the attention of a single passerby.

  “The car is that black sedan at the curb. Walk toward it between us and get in,” Hornsby said.

  Cross did as he was told; when seated in the car he leaned back and sighed. His despair drained off him in one second and he felt that he wanted to sleep. And in the next instant he knew exactly what he had to do. He would do nothing, say nothing; there was nothing that he could really say. Let them make their case; he would not help or hinder them. He would bear it as though it was not he himself who was undergoing it. The car moved off into the night, heading downtown, and he lay back, his heart locked against the world. I’ll see what they can make out of me, he said to himself.

  BOOK FIVE

  DECISION

  …Man is the only being who makes promises.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  CROSS FOUND HIMSELF in the uniquely ironic position of comprehending far more keenly than his captors the nature and meaning of the situation confronting him. Even while the car in which he sat huddled between the two detectives bore him toward the office of the District Attorney, he could anticipate the general methods and approach of the police. They had first to prove who he was. Well, let them; that was their business, not his…He wondered how much of his path of blood and deception had they uncovered; but his wonderment was devoid of any desire to erect a strategy of legal defense for himself. That did not concern him at all; his preoccupations were more basic and recondite.

  He knew that he had cynically scorned, wantonly violated every commitment that civilized men owe, in terms of common honesty and sacred honor, to those with whom they live. That, in essence, was his crime. The rest of his brutal and bloody thrashings about were the mere offshoots of that one central, cardinal fact. And for the crime of his contemptuous repudiation of all the fundamental promises that men live by he intended to make no legal defense for the good and ample reason that he well knew that no such defense was possible. And he was staunchly resolved to face his would-be judgers with a tight mouth from which not one word to help clarify his emotions or motives would issue. He would compel them, by a challenging silence, to identify his attitude.

  And Houston…? Was he still juggling ideas or had he found the courage to put two and two together? Houston, of all the officers of the law, could put the “finger” on him, could brand him guilty in a psychological sense. But had he dug up enough proof to make a legal charge stick? And would Houston dare explain his conception of this guilt to his colleagues? Would not a man in so responsible a position run the risk of losing public confidence by merely putting such notions into words…? Cross barely suppressed a smile as he glanced furtively at the stolid faces of the two detectives who sat to either side of him.

  The moment he entered the police car he knew that his search was over. There were to be no more of those torrid promptings of his heart to make him confess his horrible deeds and then wrestle and sweat to restrain his urge to kill the recipient of his confession. The burden of what was to be proved would fall upon those who had brought him to heel. His crimes had carried a stamp of the absolute and if they wanted to nail him down, their actions and attitudes would have to carry a stamp of the absolute against him. Let them haul up all of his bloody doings and turn them this way and that and see what conclusions they could come to…

  There were two immediate dangers threatening him.
The District Attorney could, if he were so minded, remand him for psychological observation at Bellevue; all right, he was confident of being declared sane. The other danger was more indirect, more difficult. Suppose the police had unraveled all that he had done and suppose the general public felt so revolted that they would want to drag him into some dirty alley and take his life and be done with it. He understood that reaction and feared it; it was the same cold fury he had felt against Herndon and Gil and Hilton…Should such now fall to him, he would be watching his own compulsions in reverse! If he could avoid those two pitfalls, he was prepared, willing even, to undergo whatever inquisitions they could serve up.

  At some point in his past life, while living the normal ritual of days allotted to us all, he had come to a consciousness of having somehow fallen into a vast web of pledges and promises which he had not intended to make and whose implied obligations had been slowly smothering his spirit; and, by a stroke of freakish good luck, he had been able to rip the viscous strands of that web and fling them behind him. As always he was honest with himself; he knew, of course, that his commitments had been no more galling or burdensome than those which other millions of men and women about him shouldered so uncomplainingly every day; yet he knew that deep in the hearts of many of those millions was the same desire—shamefaced, inarticulate, and impotent—to have done with them as he had. It was not because he was a Negro that he had found his obligations intolerable; it was because there resided in his heart a sharp sense of freedom that had somehow escaped being dulled by intimidating conditions. Cross had never really been tamed…

  He felt that at the time of his making his promises,—it had started in his childhood, before he had even been able to talk!—that his true and free consent had not been asked or given and that he had not been in a condition to understand the far-reaching nature of what he had been asked to pledge.

  What was the question with which he, in his silence, would confront them? It was this: If he was to be loyal, to love, to show pity, mercy, forgiveness; if he was to abstain from cruelty, to be mindful of the rights of others, to live and let live, to believe in such resounding words as glory, culture, civilization, and progress, then let them demonstrate how it was to be done so that the carrying out of these duties and the practicing of these virtues in the modern world would not reduce a healthy, hungry man to a creature of nervous dread and paint that man’s look of the world in the black hues of meaninglessness.

  To be sure, accident had made possible his decision to dishonor those unwritten vows that he had been circumstantially made to promise, but his eagerness in embracing the opportunities presented by that subway accident had robbed that accident of its element of contingency, and the rest had flowed naturally and inevitably.

  The assumptive promises he had welched on were not materially anchored, yet they were indubitably the things of this world, comprising as they did the veritable axis of daily existence. He, like Gil and Hilton, but for radically divergent reasons, had not been concerned with the buying and selling of corn, bonds, machines, paper, or steel. It had been the naked, irreducible facts of sentient life itself that he had tried to grapple with in his snapping asunder the ties that bound him. It was the restrictions of marriage, the duties to children, obligations to friends, to sweethearts, and blood kin that he had struck at so blindly and—gallantly? For Cross had had no party, no myths, no tradition, no race, no soil, no culture, and no ideas—except perhaps the idea that ideas in themselves were, at best, dubious!

  What made him wonder so anxiously about how much they knew of his past was that he was desirous of being put at once in the center of what was about to happen to him. He detested surprises. To be confronted continuously with the unforeseen when his movements were restricted would deprive his attitude of coherence and balance, and it was an evenness of deportment that he wanted to cling to now above all. For Cross was proud and was proud of his pride and knew it.

  And Eva—? His memory of her made a dart of wincing pain go through him. He had at last found a recollection which he could not reduce to some impulse projected out of his hungry heart, for Eva’s loneliness as expressed in her life and in her painting had become identified with the deepest regions of his being. He could have shared so much with her; they could have walked together through life; he could have been an anchor to her and she to him. But all chance of that was now gone…

  The police car pulled to a stop and Cross looked curiously at the entrance of a huge building.

  “Is this the District Attorney’s office?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Hornsby said.

  The detectives guided Cross out and escorted him through a wide door, across a deserted, spacious lobby, and stood to either side of him as they were lifted up in an elevator to the tenth floor. He was marched down a white-tiled corridor and into the anteroom of an ornately furnished office in which two uniformed policemen stood guard. Hornsby pushed open a door and Cross was ushered into the presence of Houston who, flanked by two other men, sat behind a large desk staring solemnly at him.

  “Here’s your man, sir,” Hornsby said, saluting, turning, and leaving with the other officer.

  Cross stared at the three men wordlessly. He was not going to say anything. Theirs was the burden. Houston, leaning back in a swivel chair, both watchful and relaxed, stroked his chin. Cross knew that he was in the presence of men sworn to punish those who did not obey the mandates formulated to protect lives and property, and toward them he felt no bitterness, no hate; he did not regard them as his enemies. He understood the origin of their power and authority and the scope of their duties, and he did not look upon his being hauled here as an act of injustice. Had the situation been different, he would not have hesitated to have sat down and talked with them, tried to show them that really his so-called crime was derived basically from the fact that he saw and felt the world differently than they did; he would have even tried, had he had the chance, to make them see and feel it as he did. But he knew that was useless now; it was too late…But he would not help or hinder them; theirs was the power, theirs the initiative.

  Houston finally pulled himself erect and came from behind his desk on those softly padded feet of his, his body moving slowly and stiffly, his hump seemingly more prominent than Cross could ever remember having seen it. Houston’s face was tensely concentrated, his eyes deeply absorbed with inner considerations. His long, dangling arms and his pointed, strong fingers swung grotesquely at his sides. He turned and studied a pile of papers on his desk for a moment, then whirled to Cross and said:

  “I hardly know where to begin with you. I wish to God I hadn’t met you on that train, or hadn’t talked to you. It would make my task easier…”

  “I’m sorry if I’m embarrassing you, Mr. Houston,” Cross smiled as he spoke.

  Houston stared, then glanced at his two aides and again at Cross.

  “Do you know what this is all about?” Houston asked; he acted as though he was puzzled as to what line to take.

  “I know nothing whatsoever,” Cross replied affably.

  “I’d been looking forward to having dinner with you, then these reports began to flood in here,” Houston sighed.

  The other two men, both standing, were youngish. One, the younger, was lawyerish in appearance. The other was tall, grey at the temples, and had the air of being a high-ranking police official, though he was dressed in plain clothes.

  “Is there anything you want to say before we begin questioning you, Lane or Damon or what the hell your name is?”

  So they had found out who he was! Well, good…But what else did they know?

  “I have nothing whatever to say,” Cross answered.

  “Do you acknowledge the name of Cross Damon to be your real, your own, your true name?” Houston asked.

  “I acknowledge nothing,” Cross replied.

  The three men looked at one another.

  “Listen, you’re intelligent enough, of course, to realize that I cannot force you t
o answer my questions. You also know that you have the right to counsel. You know too that what you tell me I can use against you in court. I can’t force you to incriminate yourself. But whatever it is you’re hiding, it would be better if you told me; it would be easier for you in the long run.”

  Cross smiled. He would at once set Houston straight about that.

  “You may question me, sir,” he said, hoping that Houston would question him, for that was the only way in which he could tell how much Houston knew, “but I reserve the right to answer what questions of yours I please. I might as well tell you that I’m not concerned with incriminating myself. I’m a perfectly free agent and if I elect to remain silent to some of your questions, it is for reasons of my own.”

  “Right,” Houston said, staring thoughtfully at Cross. He then went back to his desk and sat. “Sit down.”

  “I prefer standing for awhile, if you don’t mind,” Cross said; he felt better on his feet to face what was coming. He was alert, tense, but free of all dread and compulsions. He was focussed to a point of supreme self-defense.

  “If you like,” Houston muttered. “Now, let’s start at the beginning. You worked until about a month and a half ago as a clerk in the Post Office in Chicago, did you not?”

  “I don’t affirm it or deny it,” Cross said.

  “But, Damon, we’ve proof of who you are,” Houston said.

  “We got your fingerprints out of Mrs. Blount’s apartment and the FBI has at last identified you.”

  Cross did not answer; his facial expression did not change.

  “Do you now persist in denying your identity?”

  “I affirm or deny nothing,” Cross repeated.

  Houston frowned, then he turned to the elder of his two aides. “Bring in that secretary of the Postal Union, Neil,” Houston ordered.